Reunion

Am I the only one who's sick of the multiverse as a plot device?

I can’t speak to the actual physical concept of the multiverse. I don’t know enough about it, or enough about its viability versus that of the Copenhagen interpretation in explaining our world, I barely even know how to use these concepts correctly. And yet I’m sure that many of the screenwriters out there have even less of a grasp. But I get their perspective, truly, as hack writers – it’s an easy premise for them to play with, like Groundhog Day but with a veneer of scientific credibility. And, like Groundhog Day, it appeals to an inner desire we all have.

We want to know what the person did who had made the other decision. Somewhere you did it differently, and ideally did it right. You did get into Dartmouth, you did complete that touchdown pass junior year and a scout was in the audience, he finally proposed to you and you said yes.

And therefore, it was all I could think about when I walked through the streets of a West Coast city I used to call home, where I misspent my youth, and thought about that person I might be. And to find those little points at which my life and his life would have been one and the same.

What were they? Looking back, they dance across my visual cortex like the flashing images of a magic lantern.

In the South End, old wooden bungalows still sigh on overgrown lawns, threatening to be strangled by the blackberry bushes, stoops decorated with blue-robed virgins with arms outstretched and whimsical metal folk art and Tibetan prayer flags. They had once been the homes of union men and their families, airplane mechanics and longshoremen and shipyard welders. How many of them had stayed on? Their little bungalows, with their warm old wooden fixtures were selling for north of $750,000 now.

The slightly rundown streets of White Center still held their familiarity – the Salvadorean bakery, the pizza place, the bikini baristas in their little plywood shacks, the cardboard boxes of jackfruit outside the grocery stores with Khmer signage, the metal clang of machine shops, a woman smoking a cig and scrolling through her phone on the passenger side of a parked Ford Ranger outside. A blue-haired women in Marvel sweatpants and a mobility scooter rolls past, inclusive pride flag – one of many variations of the inclusive pride flag I was to see over the coming days, like those of marginally different statelets in the Holy Roman Empire – fluttering in the cool breeze.

Cresting a nearby hill, Mount Rainier stood there, as jawdropping as it was the day I first saw her, bright and distant in the sunlight, a nearer and somehow reassuring presence in the 10:00 p.m. twilight reflecting off the glaciers, lights on at the high school baseball stadium, teenagers in hoodies coming home late from band practice, squealing as they jumped on one another’s backs.

I stayed at the cheapest spot I could get that looked like it wouldn’t be a stop on a human trafficking circuit, which I remembered from years ago as douchey in a very specifically ugly, very specifically late ‘00s kind of way – a mix of hard-rawk grunge-era memorabilia, a logo that uses the Brazzers font, and once-sleek black and red furnishings just starting to show their wear and tear. The walls are thin, there’s a woman in Harry Potter pajama pants on the edge of tears in the lobby, but there is something about crumbling downtown hotels, those that have survived in any meaningful capacity, that still resonates with me. Some adolescent fantasy of hopeless mid-century adultery and highways as escape routes to the liberation of a coastal city, no matter how many times those themes have been retread.

The late sunsets are still fucking with me. I think it must still be early, we can’t have been drinking for long, my eyes and body to used to the steady diurnal cycles of the tropics. The wine is sneaking up on me – it’s a natural Austrian red served chilled, because this will be thought of as the era of the chilled natural Austrian red. The only time I can remember eating bacon ice cream was back in Obama’s first term, down the street from here, and I knew then that that time would be thought of as the era of bacon ice cream. Some of the same people were there that day as were here this evening. Everyone was prettier than I remembered.

In the market, the street preachers and the napping junkies and crowds of Asian tourists gathering around the original Starbucks were still there, and somehow I’m glad of it – I even recognized a homeless man from years earlier, actually looking a bit more trim and healthy.  The little shop where I had first haphazardly tried to write something daring and long-form was still there too, and I stopped in and drank tea and remembered what it was like to have a whole life of writing ahead of me. The overenthusiastic Millennial theater kids had grown up and were replaced with corseted femboys. The corseted femboys on both sides of the cashier’s counter talked about what time they would be at the party that night, the same way we had when we had stood on both sides of the cashier’s counter.

Bacon ice cream. Chilled natural Austrian red.

And that night, they went to their party. And I went and danced and sang with some of those people who were prettier than I remembered, as I celebrated the nuptials of two of the sweetest people I know, and they too were prettier than I remembered, as they had their first marital kiss on a boat with a gorgeous view of the skyline, and the rain turned to a perfect clear sunset after.

And then we danced and the Fernet flowed and we sang karaoke in the same Korean-style noraebang that we used to sneak liquor into in our early twenties. Coming back from the bathroom, I saw a solo couple through the slit in the door, his cock in her hand, and somehow I could only think… good for them.

The next morning, I drank the free coffee in the lobby, because of course they proudly advertise their complementary Stumptown. My old high school buddy picked me up and we walked around the Ballard Locks, and around my old neighborhood, and the cemetery where Bruce Lee is buried. We still talked with the same dorky passion we did in high school, about satellite photography and cooking techniques, about the assorted insanities of the world we’d inherited. He didn’t have time to play music as much anymore, I didn’t have time to bake bread like I used to. In the evening, the lights of downtown seemed colder than ever. The cold light emanates forth from the not-quite-geodesic domes on Lenora Street, in what I had remembered as a neighborhood of old shipping warehouses just starting to be replaced with noodle bars and hot yoga studios, made all the more hideous by their being not quite geodesic. An architecture that feigns the organic. “Look, Daddy’s balls.” We bro-hug and I wave him goodnight. I do my best to turn my eyes away from the cold fluorescent lights above, the ugly glass-box bars with ESPN playing silently with closed captions, with business Americans getting schnockered on IPA.

And yet I couldn’t avoid them, at least not fully. I tried to give each of the devils their due. I tried to listen to and empathize with the loudmouthed tech bro, before he referred to his “vibe tribe” (I researched that to see if that was an actual thing, and it’s also the name of an Israeli psy-trance DJ, natch). I tried to smile and nod along to the conversation of a wealthy Harley-Davidson collector from the Midwest, before he began verging into QAnon territory and his wife pulled him back – “honey, not everyone believes the same things you do.” I couldn’t help but prod the wine bar day-drunk businesswoman as she talked about fucking her way around The Villages, Florida (yep, the giant retirement community) and loudly accusing me of being judgmental in my silence – a reminder that women are the only ones who still try to imitate the cast of Mad Men, that particular boys’ club having long devolved into a bunch of cargo-shorts douchebags, gamers, and Wall Street man-children. All three, really, seemed to be chasing a vision of America – a hippie utopia, a white picket fence and crewcut 1950s suburb, Don Draper in a suit – that had long since dissolved.

“The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.

 

For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it…

 

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts.

 

All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.

 

The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

 

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

 

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.”

 

-- Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, who himself abandoned his family and walked down the railroad track in the midst of a psychotic break, not long before penning those words.

But even in a world of grotesques you find that true beauty. You wind up moving past them, and in the dive bar with your old friend, seeing more people, all of them pretty in their own weird way, Italian and Filipino, Ethiopian and Lao, dancing over the sticky floors. You chase your dirt-cheap Rainier with Chartreuse Verte. Around the corner, there are brass bands playing and the local Bandidos chapter is parked out front, and they seem, strangely, to be vibing just like everyone else. You meet another writer, maybe a decade or so older, and she tells you about trying to express yourself in the fundamentally uncaring world in which we find ourselves.

And in this moment, there we were. Me and my other self. Our paths met, crossed.

Before diverging in new directions again.

And not long after I poured the last of my American change in a coffee stand tip cup at Seatac. And I was back over the ocean again, neatly tucked into the path that I had chosen.

Violence After Midnight

The two of us are lying in bed. Ms. S. wakes up, and hears me mumbling.

-She won't expect a thing, I whisper.

Still lying down, I slowly reach my hand across. My fingers run across over her face, and then I jump up, and press my hands down, covering her mouth and nose. She struggles for a moment, and then throws me off.

*

As she tells me this in the morning, I don't know what to think. Did this really happen? How could it have?

My memories of the night had been staying in, watching a movie, cooking dinner, splitting a bottle of wine, going to bed fairly early, and getting a good night's sleep. Dreamless, even.

I'd of course heard countless stories about people doing all sorts of things while sleepwalking. And yet I'd never had any experience of it. Roommates, girlfriends... none of them have ever said I'd done similar things. I've always been a fairly light sleeper, and I toss and turn somewhat, but never anything even remotely close to this act.

To even call it an “act” has the horrifying implication that it had a motive, that it had intention. I know I can't blame myself for what I've done in my sleep. But it's still difficult to admit that I'd been violent in my sleep, especially as someone who doesn't really have violent tendencies. And I know that if I do admit it, while I won't become a pariah, I'll become vaguely suspect in some way. It is tantamount to making visible the albatross around my neck.

And regardless of any question of motivation, it makes the last few moments before falling asleep a bit more tense, a bit more nervous.

The fear of sleep is something pretty innate, and it's few people who haven't experienced it to some degree. Because when you are lying there in the darkness, you are prone, and whether the fear is that of monsters under the bed when you're five years old or is that of the killers and rapists outside when you're 35 years old, we fear what crawls around in the dark.

But what's also frightening is the fear not of your defenselessness when you're sleeping, but of you could do when sleeping. The sleepwalker is an active participant in our world, but their motives are firmly embedded in the hazy logic of the dreaming world. Abiding by the logic of some hidden place within consciousness, the somnambulist lives on both sides of that line, and is rendered blameless because-- like amnesiacs or the insane-- he or she has become separated from common human reality.

So whatever parasitic force within me took over that night, I hope, that by putting it out in the open instead of burying it in shame and denial, I can confront it as such. In calling it what it is, the albatross can fall off and into the sea.

After Midnight, 27 May, 2015

There I was, in a living room. I knew that I'd been there before. The sage-green wallpaper, the molding on the windows, there was a certain familiarity. But I knew that I knew this place from a long time ago, early childhood. That's it, a house I used to visit often. I know this walnut table. I know the smell of this room. We lit the candles, and one by one, our friends walked in through the door, sat down at matching walnut chairs, their hands folded.

And then I wake up.

My, that was pleasant.

But then why is there a knife in my hand?

Did I sleepwalk and get it from the kitchen? Or was it under my pillow this whole time? Did I put it there so I could defend myself? If so, from whom? What am I not remembering?

I lie there a second. It's heavy in my right hand. I can't even lift it. I run my left index finger along the blade, and it's dull to the touch.

What is that noise? Whose voices are those? What are they so angry about? Oh god, that's my voice. I'm yelling at someone. Who? Why am I saying these things? And now I've stopped speaking English altogether.

A face looks in through the window, with heavy eyebrows, mouth slightly hidden.

And it knows what I know.

That this knife is about to go directly into my heart.

*

And then suddenly, I come to.

I hadn't been sleeping there, not exactly. Dreaming, but awake. The knife is simply my right fist, clenched and heavy, and I'm just now able to move it again. The face is the illumination of a streetlight through the palm fronds.

I'm normally loathe to talk about my dreams. It seems so bloody pointless, so false, and so impossible to convey the truly special qualities of a dream through something so vulgar as simple description. But this was barely a dream, and it was one that I had both the privilege and the misfortune to experience while at least partially conscious.

*

While the physiologically activity of the brain during this process is beginning to be understood scientifically, and has to do with poor signaling in the complex in and around the amygdala during sleep, the root causes for this misinformation remain somewhat shrouded in mystery. Genetics, clinical depression, narcolepsy, poor sleep hygiene, stress, sleeping position, and countless other factors are suggested as causes.

Meanwhile, different societies around the world have their own folk explanations. In Medieval Europe, they were incubi and succubi, and in Scandinavia, they were mara, giving us the word nightmare. In the American South, it was the ghost known as the haint riding you, and in Mexico, it was the devil sitting on your chest. And in remote parts of Southeast Asia, particularly in backwater regions of Laos, Thailand, and the Philippines, it is blamed on the same spirits that cause young men to never wake up, a condition with countless names throughout the Pacific hinterlands, but only described to science with the sinister and no less mythological name of “sudden unexpected death syndrome” less than a generation ago.

*

Of course, this is what I spent the following day reading. I wanted some kind of explanation, something scientific preferably, or if not, at least a comfortable structure, something to provide narrative and meaning, regardless of how true it was.

There was that house, the candles, the walnut table. Yes, I had been in that house. And the smell of the living room, that was real too. And it was the same as that of the perfume of a woman who had shared this bed with me a couple of nights before, the scent of which still lingered in the corners of my bedsheets.

Our daily lives haunt our dream lives. This is nothing new. Freud said the same thing over 100 years ago, but had the bullheadedness to consider his free association to be science.

I'll say it in far simpler terms, without any pretenses of positivism. In our sleeping hours, we walk through far deeper, darker forests.

By the Sea

My first sight of the ocean was of a desolate stretch of coastline in Southern Mexico, just north of the Cancun costa del date rape. Where the tourists hadn't yet arrived in the early '90s, a stretch of beach towards a ferry port ran amid assorted wreckage. Where empty concrete lots, stained with the accumulated rust of a few hurricane seasons ran down to the beach.

On the beach lay the hulls of fishing boats. In retrospect, they were probably simple fishing boats or small ferries. But they seemed to me, as a small child without any experience of boats or the sea or the adult world in general, to be great ships. And here they were, laid out and tipped over, rusted, torn apart, encrusted in alien lifeforms, as if chewed apart by monsters, their skeletons laid out like a horror movie set.

And there was the smell, not only unique, but vast and pervasive, an unfamiliar range of metallic ions atop rotting marine life. There were of course similarities to the chilly lakes and streams of the Upper Midwest I was used to swimming and fishing at, but to compare the two was like porterhouse and hamburger, two things made of the same substance but one infinitely richer than the other.

Years later, I stumbled upon Kunstformen der Natur, published in 1901 by the German biologist, philosopher, and artist Ernst Haeckel, whose stony positivist outlook was counterbalanced by the wild flights of fancy of his drawings of sea creatures. In Haeckel's book, the natural world was cut apart, stylized, turned into elaborate spires and quincunxes, monstrosities of radial symmetry, creatures like nightmare genitalia. Animals that I recognize as animals, that have the evolutionary patterns of animals, that seem uncannily neither animal nor plant nor fungus, slippery and primal things.

Not long after, in college, I learned a term for such things-- abject-- those things that seem to evade our symbolic notions of what reality should look like. Things like a corpse, like a weeping sore. Things that seem to come from some deep and amorphous primal space. Lots of Lacanian psychoanalysts, thinking they were thinking, wrote about this in dense, allusive treatises, and lots of French feminists, with little basis and a lot of essentialism, somehow equated the abject and the feminine.

The depths of the sea somehow lurked at the background of everything, the formlessness that appeared in dreams, at the edges of everyday life.

I stepped into a pristine tropical cove, fringed with waving palm trees. Underneath, the rocks swarmed with a thousand olivine-black sea cucumbers.

The Dream-City

For years I have been haunted by a city that appears in my dreams. This isn't a recurring dream, but rather a motif that appears in countless dreams. I can't remember when I first began to dream of this city, but somewhere in my adolescence, I became aware enough to recognize this city as such.

Perhaps I am dreaming of one place, perhaps of many. I don't think that distinction applies here. As far as I can tell, it is a boundless urban space, extending as far as I can see, lacking clear divisions or boundaries, infinitely entangled and complex. Yet I can pull out distinct landmarks in this city: an antique rooftop water tower, a warehouse filled with cardboard boxes, a sludge-choked canal, a hotel with long verandas and bougainvilleas wrapped around high trellises. I can't remember how many times I've seen them. All I know is that I have encountered them, and they have permanently embedded themselves within my dream-city. Our waking world shows a remarkable similarity. We may have a memory of a specific house without knowing where it is or the conditions under which we saw it. All we know is that we saw it somewhere.

If we experience our dreams as the conscious mind sorting out all the empirical stuff that we process in our lives, then it stands to reason that this dream-city is composed of elements of the places I've visited and of my visual and auditory memories of those places. Certainly, individual buildings and patterns are borrowed from my everyday life. From an early memory of Kansas City, I recognize a looming pair of candy-striped smokestacks. From Seattle, there is a darkened bar with red candles at every table and a waitress with a tattoo of three black geometric symbols gracing a pale wrist. This city agglomerates my memories, my anxieties, my flawed perceptions, and my logical deductions, recombining them into a seamless nowhere and everywhere.

The dream-city is filled with names and places that correspond to real names and places in the real world. They seemingly lack meaning; they are places I have been, places I've never been, places I've seen in photos, places I've read about, imaginary places in novels and fairy tales, places I only know of as reference points on maps. These names correspond to an entirely mental geography. This city is Nairobi, Oregon, located in the heart of Germany, anchored by the bristling minarets of the Bosphorus and girded by the Danube which empties into the Indian Ocean, which is just outside the city-- you arrive from that seashore via the Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México, disembarking at the Finland Station.

A high percentage of the qualities and images seem to derive from early childhood. I grew up in a locale going through its growing pains, too small to be considered a city-- an overgrown prairie town, just big enough to have a tiny shopping mall. As the mall attracted business, the old Main Street had languished. What was left were antique stores, biker bars, shoe stores that had whole sections for diabetic footwear. Above the shops, the second floors of the old brick frontages had apartments, offices, and small, secondary retail outlets. As my parents shopped, I would run around the stores and behind the stores, looking at the patterns in floors covered in little hexagonal tiles and ceilings gridded with identical pressed-tin panels. Behind, in the dusty brick alleys, were steaming grates, crushed wooden pallets, and bags of hair from the barbershops and beauty parlors. These forgotten labyrinths still come back to me in daydreams, and in my sleep, they seem to overtake all other reality.

My happiest dreams and my nightmares seem to be embedded within this maze of reconstituted memory. This infinite space is a reservoir of dramas of a magnitude I have never experienced. I've fallen in love with utter strangers, I've thrown myself off a narrow bridge. It is almost like this is a laboratory of experiences and emotions, and I am the white rat, unsure of its purpose.

As I awake, the shape of the city remains for a second, appearing almost as a weakly tinted transparency held between my eyes and the world around me. Its light and its shadows linger around the edges of my eyelids. But I am finally in the unequivocal here and now. The city is sliding from view. By the time I step in the shower, it is a few images and a remnant of whatever emotions I was feeling. By the time I'm on the bus to work, it is a fainter version of that perception. And by the time I'm pouring my second cup of coffee, mid-morning, I can only remember concrete narratives and images that I have chosen to remember, that I have repeated to myself, that I have written down. It is at this point where the conscious mind has seemingly conquered the unconscious, and enforced logical and real patterns onto a remembered unreality. I have a snapshot: an empty hallway, a radio antenna. It is all I have, and I won't have it for long.